Half-Life might as well be a mythical unicorn that poops rainbows and that could even the oldest video cards into a GTX 1080 by the simply being loaded. One journalist from Games Informer attempted to track down the elusive 10 year old piece of vaporware as revealed at the end of the most recent Game Informer video podcast.

Interestingly enough according to his sources Half-Life 3 never really made it out of the prototype stage, with no more than a handful of developers working on each prototype. One of these prototype used Real Time Strategy mechanics, could Gordon Freeman have commanded entire armies of Ant Lions at some point? Another idea that Valve reportedly experimented with was adventure game mechanics that used real life actors. Could this have been some sort of advanced performance capture technology?

Sadly Andrew Reiner didn’t really offer up any more concrete information save for this truncated soundbite regarding what he knows about the previous state of Halfe-Life 3:

“I was actually chasing a story on Half-Life 3 … I talked to one developer who told me it was a hot mess. There were so many proto-types with four or five people working on them that went no where. Two of the ideas was an RTS game that would have changed the script. Another would have been a version with live actors, like NightTrap… I reached out to 10 – 15 people who worked for the company and they just didn’t want to talk about it all.”

To watch the Game Informer crew chat about Half-Life 2: Epsode 3 head-on over to the 5:45 mark of the embedded video below. Perhaps in some alternate universe the Combine have successfully enslaved humanity simply because Half-Life 3 is a reality.